our.directory

Terms of Service

Effective 2026-05-31. This is the agreement between you and Our Directory LLC, an Oregon limited liability company operating our.directory (referred to here as "the directory," "we," "our," or "us"). It is written in plain language on purpose. If a sentence is ambiguous, the plain reading wins.

1. What this service is

our.directory is a human-curated link directory. People sign up, submit links, write notes about them, vouch for links other people submitted, and follow each other and topics. We host and display what curators submit. We do not generate the submissions, write the notes, or rank the results with a hidden model. The ranking formula is published at /policies/ranking; the content-safety layers are described at /policies/safety.

2. You are a curator, not an employee

When you submit a link, vouch for a link, write a note, or otherwise contribute to the directory, you are doing so in your individual capacity. You are not our agent, employee, partner, contractor, or representative. Your submissions and notes are your own speech, not ours. We host them. We do not author or endorse them.

Moderator and admin actions (clearing review queues, removing links, handling DMCA notices, banning accounts) are taken by us in our capacity as the operator of the service. Those are the directory's decisions, not the curator's.

3. Eligibility

You must be at least 13 years old to use our.directory. If we discover that an account belongs to someone under 13, we will close it and delete the associated data. Some jurisdictions (and some of our third-party services) effectively require 16+; if you are in the EEA or the UK and under 16, please don't sign up.

4. Your account

You sign up with an email address and a password. Don't share the password. Don't run more than one account at a time without a real reason (we don't have a strict one-per-person rule, but ban-evasion alt accounts are not okay). Pick a handle that isn't impersonating someone else. See the impersonation clause in section 7.

Moderator and admin accounts require a second factor at sign-in. This is enforced in code, not just in policy.

5. What you keep, what you grant us

You retain copyright in everything you submit. Your curator notes are your writing. Your choices of which links to submit and which topics to use are your editorial decisions.

You grant us a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free license to store, display, distribute, and index your submissions, vouches, follow relationships, and notes for the purpose of operating, improving, securing, and promoting the directory. The license lasts for as long as the content is on the directory, plus up to 30 days afterward for backups and audit-log integrity. The license is non-sublicensable except as described in the next paragraph.

You also grant other curators a narrow license to quote and refer to your submissions and notes within the directory for the purpose of vouching for them, discussing them, or building on them. This is the only way the vouch-and-quote feature can work: if @alice writes a note and @bob vouches for the link by quoting part of @alice's note, the quote needs to keep working even after @alice changes her mind. Outside the directory, this cross-curator license does not apply. Your writing is yours.

We do not claim ownership of your content, and we will not modify the meaning of what you wrote. Your content will not be licensed to AI training services and will not be sold. If we ever transfer the directory to a different operator, that operator inherits this license on the same terms; the terms cannot be silently broadened.

6. What other curators can see

The directory is signup-walled: everything inside is visible to signed-in curators. Your handle, the links you've submitted, your notes, your vouches, the topics you've used, and your follow graph are visible to other signed-in users. Your email address is not. Edit history on links is visible: every revision is attributed to the curator who made it.

If you want something to be private, don't submit it to a directory. The transparency page spells out the data flows in more detail.

7. What you can't do

You agree not to:

  • submit links to malware, phishing pages, or content that is illegal where the directory operates;
  • submit child sexual abuse material; this is a hard block and we report what we find under 18 USC § 2258A;
  • submit pornography or other adult content; the directory doesn't index it. We block submissions from known adult domains and remove the rest when we notice them, but our screening reads the link's domain and your description, not the destination page — so a clean-looking submission can slip through until a curator reports it;
  • submit content that infringes someone else's copyright or trademark (see section 11);
  • harass, threaten, dox, or coordinate harassment against another curator or any third party;
  • impersonate another real person or a public figure in a way designed to deceive;
  • scrape, mirror, or republish the directory's contents in bulk, or use the directory as training data for a machine-learning model, without our written permission;
  • attempt to access accounts that aren't yours, bypass rate limits, or interfere with the operation of the service;
  • use the directory to send spam, run affiliate-link schemes, or pump up commercial content under the appearance of curation;
  • circumvent a ban by creating a new account.

8. Moderation, removal, and suspension

We may, in good faith, restrict access to or remove material we consider obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, deceptive, illegal, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected. That phrasing tracks 47 U.S.C. § 230(c)(2). We may also remove material for any reason consistent with the rest of these terms.

Specific moderation actions and the surfaces that trigger them are described at /policies/safety. Every moderator action is logged to a permanent audit trail.

If your account is suspended or banned, you'll see the reason at sign-in. The links you submitted before the ban generally remain visible. Other curators may have built on top of them, and removing your submissions wholesale would damage their work. Your vouches and votes stop counting from the moment of the ban. Banning is reversible; we can and do unban accounts when the situation calls for it.

9. Reports and how decisions are made

Anyone can report a link via the Report button on its detail page. Reports go to a moderator queue. Moderators decide; the system does not auto-remove based on report counts. Curators are not punished for filing reports in good faith, even ones we ultimately dismiss. Reports filed in obvious bad faith (volume-spam, coordinated brigading) may themselves be grounds for moderation.

Copyright complaints follow the separate DMCA process described in section 11. Misuse of the copyright process (for example, filing a notice to suppress criticism rather than infringement) is handled by section 11 and US Code § 512(f), not by the report queue.

10. Account deletion and data export

You can delete your account from /settings. When you do:

  • your profile becomes inaccessible immediately;
  • your email, password hash, two-factor secret, and session tokens are deleted within 30 days;
  • your submitted links remain visible but are reattributed to a tombstone account ("@deleted"), since other curators may have vouched for and built on top of them, and discarding them wholesale would damage that work;
  • your curator notes on links you submitted remain visible under the tombstone account, except for any notes you choose to delete first;
  • your vouches and votes are hidden from public surfaces and stop counting toward ranking and trust calculations;
  • moderator and DMCA records that reference your account are retained for legal reasons (see the privacy policy, retention section);
  • backups containing your data age out on a normal 30-day cycle.

If you want a copy of your data before you delete, request an export from legal@our.directory and we'll send you a machine-readable file (JSON) of your profile, submissions, notes, vouches, follows, and topic subscriptions within 30 days. There is no charge.

11. Copyright, DMCA, and counter-notices

We respond to notices of claimed copyright infringement under the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act, 17 U.S.C. § 512. The full procedure and our designated agent's contact details are on the /dmca page. The short version:

  • To notify us of allegedly infringing material, use the web form at /dmca/submit or email legal@our.directory. Your notice must include the six elements listed in § 512(c)(3): identification of the work, identification of the infringing material, your contact information, a good-faith statement, a statement under penalty of perjury, and your signature.
  • If your material was removed and you believe it was a mistake or a misidentification, you can file a counter-notice using the same channel. Per § 512(g), we will restore the material in 10–14 business days unless the original complainant files suit.
  • Filing a notice or counter-notice under penalty of perjury means filing one in bad faith carries real legal risk under § 512(f). Don't.

Repeat infringers. Per § 512(i), we maintain a policy of terminating, in appropriate circumstances, the accounts of curators who are repeat copyright infringers. We track notices per account in our admin tools, escalate on a written internal ladder (warning → suspension → termination), and apply judgement about whether the notices appear bona fide.

Misinformation, defamation, and copyright are separate processes. The Report button handles the first two; the DMCA process handles the third. We do not "downrank instead of remove" for copyright. Section 512 does not have that option.

12. Third parties

Operating the directory requires a handful of third-party services for email delivery, bot-protection, link-safety screening, and analytics. The full list, including what data each one sees, is in the privacy policy and the transparency page. Those vendors have their own terms; we don't speak for them.

13. No warranty

The directory is provided "as is" and "as available." Curator notes are opinions. A link being submitted does not mean the submitter, the people who vouched for it, or the operator vouch for its accuracy, safety, or current status. Things on the internet break, get repurposed, or change their meaning over time, and a directory of links inherits that. To the maximum extent permitted by law, we disclaim all implied warranties including merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, and non-infringement.

14. Limitation of liability

To the maximum extent permitted by law, we are not liable for indirect, incidental, consequential, special, or punitive damages arising from your use of the directory. If a court decides we are liable for something despite the rest of this section, our total liability for any claim is limited to the amount you paid us in the twelve months before the claim arose.

15. Indemnification

If your use of the directory (your submissions, your notes, your conduct toward other curators) causes a third party to bring a claim against us, you agree to defend and indemnify us against that claim, including reasonable legal fees, to the extent the claim arose from your actions and not ours.

16. Governing law and venue

These terms are governed by the laws of the State of Oregon, without regard to its conflict-of-laws rules. Any dispute that is not resolved informally goes to the state or federal courts located in Oregon. You and we both consent to jurisdiction and venue there. If you live somewhere whose consumer-protection law gives you the right to sue locally regardless of this clause, this clause doesn't take that right away.

17. Changes to these terms

We will post any material change to these terms at least 30 days before the change takes effect, and notify signed-up curators by email or in-product notice. The current version always has an effective date at the top, and we keep prior versions available on request. Non-material changes (typo fixes, link reformatting, vendor swaps that don't change a data flow) can be made without notice. Changes are not retroactive: content you submitted under earlier terms continues to be governed by those terms for the license-grant and warranty-disclaimer purposes; everything else moves forward.

Continuing to use the directory after a change takes effect means you accept the change. If you don't accept it, the path forward is to delete your account (section 10).

18. Severability and the rest

If a court finds part of these terms unenforceable, the rest still applies. Failing to enforce a clause once does not waive the right to enforce it later. These terms, together with the privacy policy and the policy pages they reference, are the whole agreement between you and us about the directory.

19. Contact

For anything in this document: legal@our.directory. For DMCA notices: legal@our.directory or the form at /dmca/submit. For everything else, the Report button on the relevant link is usually the right place to start.